Let her go, their father said, as the wind shook their kites—that sound they made, like a thousand birds, as they shot into the sky, free at last.
2
THEN, when they had nothing left, he found them. It was morning, before school. People said it was an accident. She left her car running. Their room was over the garage, and fumes had drifted up through the uneven boards. There they were in the bed, pressed close like lovers or maybe children, holding hands. Lined against the wall were baskets of folded laundry, and the thought occurred to him that, even dead, she didn’t want anyone getting stuck with her chores.
An accident, people said. A mistake. But Cole knew, they all did.
They had a wake, people drifting by their coffins, afraid to get too close. After it was over Father Geary came to the house in his black Beetle. Their uncle, Rainer, brought his girlfriend, Vida, and stood around in his cheap suit, smoking. The boys carried their ashes up to the ridge. Eddy held their father’s, Wade their mother’s. The muddy field swallowed Vida’s shoes. She took them off and walked across the soft earth in her stockings. Up on top, they stood in a tight circle, the sun full and bright. They spilled out the ashes and the wind blew them away. Father Geary said a prayer, and Cole wondered if his mother was with Jesus now and hoped she was. He pictured her up there taking His hand, and that made him feel a little better. He pictured her in a white gown, standing on a cloud, the yellow rays streaming out like they did on the cover of his catechism book.
We’re all you boys have now, his uncle apologized, his hand heavy on Cole’s shoulder as they walked back down to the house.
In the afternoon, people came to pay their respects. Mrs. Lawton and her husband came with Travis. Why don’t you boys get some fresh air, the sheriff said.
Cole put on his father’s coat and it swam around him like a shadow. He pushed his hands into the pockets, curled his fingers around a bag of Drum and some papers. Cole could smell him, tobacco and gasoline and sweat. He thought maybe it was the smell of bad luck.
They crossed the wet field and walked back up to the ridge, the wind in their ears. Travis watched him roll a cigarette and they stood close so he could light it. Cole could smell the fried chicken Travis had eaten for lunch and it made him hungry. Travis dragged on the cigarette like somebody playing a kazoo and looked at Cole mournfully. I’m real sorry about your folks. He held out his hand like a grown man and Cole shook it. They stood there a while longer, looking down at the house, the brown fields, the cars parked haphazardly in the dead grass.
After everyone left, Father Geary tucked a dish towel into his trousers and made them a dinner of pork chops and peas and potatoes. When they were done, Eddy rolled cigarettes while Wade made tea and then they sat there, drinking tea and smoking. Father Geary liked to drink his out of a glass and taught Wade how to pour the boiling water over the blade of a knife so the glass wouldn’t break. Drinking tea like this seemed exotic to Cole, and it gave him the idea that there might be life beyond the farm, although he could hardly imagine it.
He had come to know the priest through observation and his mother said he was a man of the world, but Cole didn’t know what she meant by that. Maybe that he’d been places, important places, and knew things ordinary people had never heard about. His mother had been fond of Father Geary and sometimes Cole imagined she was a little in love with him, even though priests aren’t supposed to fall in love. He wondered how much she’d told Father Geary about his father and how meanly he’d treated her, the things he sometimes did to her.
They walked Father Geary to the door, where he put on his coat and wrapped a scarf around his neck. He pulled Cole close and patted him on the back, and Cole could smell his hair cream and the shrill lozenge in his mouth as he whispered, Your mother’s with God now. Cole watched him cross the front yard in his black clothes to his car and could see the heavy clouds collecting on his windshield. As he drove away, Cole wondered where this man lived and what he’d do when he got there.
—
THAT DAY, after the pawnshop. The last time he’d been with her alone, she hurried into the car, her cheeks painted with shame. Going home, they passed some girls selling kittens and pulled over to have a look. His mother scooped an orange kitty into her hands. Cole picked a black one. How much? his mother asked.
Pop’s gonna be mad.
Oh, they’re free, the older girl said.
He thought he saw his mother smile. They put the kittens in the car and she sat there for a minute without starting it and then tears rolled down her cheeks again. The same girl came over and said, Is she all right? Like his mother couldn’t answer for herself, like she wasn’t even there.
She pulled back onto the road, and for a long time they were quiet, with just the wind blasting through the windows and the kittens mewing. He finally said, You’ll be okay, Ma, and she nodded like he was right and said, I’ll be fine, like she needed to say it out loud and confirm it in her own mind. He smiled at her even though he wasn’t happy, then turned on the radio, and it was a Woody Guthrie tune and they sang it together, heading home: Hey, boys, I’ve come a long ways / Well, boys, I’ve come a long ways / Oh boys, I’ve come a long lonesome ways, / Along in the sun and the rain.
She was dead now and he had begun to hate her for it. He would try very hard to remember her, how pretty she looked in her church clothes or the hard face she made when she smoked, but the pictures in his mind only made him sad.
He never knew what happened to those kittens, because the next day they were gone. He searched the house and the barns and the fields, but there was no trace at all, and he thought maybe his father had dumped them someplace, and sometimes, when he thought back on that last day with her, the orange sky, or singing together so loud, he wondered if it was just something he’d dreamed up.
That whole week Cole didn’t go to school and no one came looking for him. Everything kind of stopped. His brothers roaming around, doing nothing. Dishes piled up on the counters, old cans full of butts. For half a day he watched things in the house. The curtains barely moving. Stink bugs climbing up the window frame, then falling back to the floor right before reaching the top; he’d throw his ball, trying to hit one. You could hear things, the wind. Time passed, he guessed. Time had become something else, something strange. You couldn’t see the beginning or the end of things. There was only this middle part.
Strangers bringing food, neighbors. Climbing onto the porch, their arms outstretched, holding platters of fried chicken, meatloaf, stuffed peppers. One night, Mrs. Pratt cooked them dinner. Roast beef and green beans. Her name was June, her husband called her Juniper. She had hands that crept softly, like frightened animals. For some reason they didn’t have any kids. Mr. Pratt worked for General Electric. He wore clean shoes and had clean fingernails and smelled like limes, and Eddy said he had a desk job. They ate in silence, their forks clanking, like they were waiting for something. After they left, Eddy sat in their father’s chair and rolled cigarettes and drank their father’s whiskey, and his fingertips had gone yellow and his hands were big and square. Smoke drifted lazily through the room, mixing with the flashing blue light of the TV, and Cole got scared, and thought about all the things around the farm that needed fixing and how nobody had ever bothered to repair them or even notice they were broken.
Eddy was the boss now. He took after their father, ornery and skeptical, but also had their mother’s patience. Like all of the Hales, he was tall and had blue eyes, though Eddy’s were meaner and the girls liked that. In his dark farm clothes he offered them a dare. They thought they could save him.
Wade shuffled around the house, his clothes baggy and not fastened or buttoned. That was just Wade. He wasn’t a stickler for details. He said he planned to join up with the army the minute he turned eighteen and nobody could stop him.
I made up my mind.
You got to finish school first.
Long as they don’t throw me out.
Long as you don’t cause
any trouble.
You don’t have to get mad.
I’m not mad.
I made up my mind. You can’t talk me out of it.
Eddy handed Cole a toolbox. Here, he said. Make yourself useful.
The greasy metal toolbox had been their father’s. It held a bunch of rusty screwdrivers and a hammer and a whole array of nails. With satisfaction, he nailed down some loose boards. When that was done he figured out how to replace a broken windowpane in the cellar with a fresh square of glass and only cut his finger a little bit and it didn’t even hurt. He tried to screw the banister back onto the wall, but the screw was stripped and he didn’t have another one that fit just right and the wood was too soft to hold it anyway. It was beyond his expertise, he told Eddy.
After a few days he got to thinking things would be all right, that they could go on just the three of them, but then these two men in suits showed up. They stood on the porch like they were selling something. After they made their introductions, the skinny one said, You all’s got a default on your loan. I’m here to tell you that the bank’s repossessing this farm. He presented the letter like they’d won something.
Eddy said, Our mother had plans to sell it.
The man put his hand on Eddy’s shoulder. Too late for that now, son. It’ll go up for auction in a couple of weeks.
The other man gave them each a box. Put your stuff in it.
After the men left, Eddy said, Go get in her car.
The garage was dark, the car just sitting there. Eddy swung the doors open with a kind of grace, like a magician about to do a trick. Since Cole was youngest, Eddy made him sit in the back. Cole thought he could still smell exhaust and tried to hold his breath. Where we going, Eddy? Wade said. Eddy didn’t answer. He started the engine and backed out fast and drove into the field. The car dipped and lurched. One of her lipsticks rolled around on the floor. The sun was sinking down behind the ridge. It was halfway to dark, and the locust trees were ready to fight with their curled black fists. The wind slammed up against the windows. In the middle of the field Eddy fishtailed and cut the engine.
For a couple of minutes they just sat there, watching the sky go pink like it was hurt. Then Eddy got out, stretching tall with an air of ceremony. Get out.
They stood there waiting. Eddy opened the trunk and took out a bat and held it up over his head. This is for her, he said, and brought it down onto the hood. He raised it up again and brought it back down and went on like that over and over again, and you could hear him heaving with the effort, his face full of menace. Cole cried, he couldn’t help it, and Eddy said he’d better quit it or he’d give him something to cry about. Go on, he said, handing him the bat.
I can’t.
Eddy gripped his shoulder. Do it for your mother.
The bat was heavier than he could remember from his days in Little League. He raised it up and closed his eyes briefly, as if in prayer, then brought it down on the car. It scarcely made a dent, but Eddy nodded that he’d done good and rested his hand on the back of his neck, just like his father had.
They took turns. The hood jutting up in a heap of triangles. The windshield splintered. His brothers beat that car so hard Cole almost felt sorry for it. He watched and cried. Tears rolled down his cheeks into his mouth and tasted of dirt. It was their dirt. It was their father’s and their grandpa’s dirt and all the men who had come before who were ghosts now and guarded the land in their church suits and stocking feet, their pockets full of worms. When he was little, his grandpa took him out on the big orange tractor with wheels as tall as a full-grown man. Cole sat on his lap, surveying the pasture that would one day be his; then his grandpa cut the motor and you could hear all the little creatures scrambling in the dirt and you could hear the grass and the wind. You’re a Hale, son, his grandpa told him. Around here that counts for something.
They believed in things—the good Lord. His grandma was always saying the good Lord this and the good Lord that. She said most people were good on the inside, where it mattered. You have to give them a chance to show their goodness, she used to say. Some people need more time, that’s all. She liked to make stained-glass cookies and let him do the hammering, crushing the hard candy into tiny bits. He’d climb up on the kitchen stool at the counter and she’d do some design, usually a cross, and tell him how to arrange the pieces. Once it was done, she’d hold it up to the window, and splotches of color shone on the walls. We got church right here, she’d say. Don’t even have to leave the house. His grandma could cook. She had big hands for a woman. In her apron, she’d kneel in the garden, tugging weeds, cradling fat tomatoes. Snapdragons up to his elbows. A whole parade of flowers. He had a tire swing. Summers, his mother gave him lunch out of doors. She’d cut the sandwiches in triangles, cream cheese and jelly, her pretty hair full of sun, wind. He’d come through the screen door at the end of the day with dirt on his skin.
They left the car there in the field. They dug a hole and buried the keys like something dead. That car ain’t goin’ nowhere, Wade said, his shirt soaked through with sweat. We made sure of that, right, Eddy?
Eddy didn’t answer him. He was breathing hard, hugging himself. Cole saw that he was crying. The wind came up behind them, and it was a cold wind. Their shirts filled with it. His brothers stared at the car and what they’d done to it.
The house was dark. The windows pushed back the sunset. The cold wind came up again and he almost felt like running.
What we gonna do now? Wade said. What we gonna do without Mother?
I wish I knew, Eddy said.
They watched TV for a while, and Eddy and Wade got drunk on their father’s Jim Beam. Cole left them sleeping on the couch with the television on. He liked the sound of it as he went to bed, and for a minute he could pretend that his parents were out somewhere. He slept in, and when he finally woke it was afternoon. The house was quiet, waiting. He didn’t know where his brothers were.
He stepped into the hall and stood outside his parents’ door. Since that morning when they’d taken them away on stretchers and covered them with blankets, Eddy said he couldn’t go in. Sometimes Cole would put his hand on the wood as if feeling for a heartbeat. Now he turned the knob and stepped inside.
The room was dark; the shades pulled. He tugged on one and it snapped up and flapped around like it was angry, and the room filled up with so much light he had to squint. It was still windy out, and you could see all the trees moving around like a chorus of blind people. His ears filled with the sound they made, and the shadows of branches stretched across the floor and mingled against one another. He tried to open a window, but it was painted shut and he remembered his parents arguing about it, his mother accusing his father of being careless, and this brought their voices back to him and he looked at the unmade bed, half expecting them to be there. He could still see where their heads had been on their pillows. He was crying a little and couldn’t remember why he was here, or even who he was. He was like a spirit, feeling the whirl of some other place, the place his mother had gone to.
He climbed onto her side of the bed and pulled the satin hem of the blanket under his chin. He could smell his mother. He shut his eyes very tight and tried not to be afraid, but he was. He tried to talk to God, hoping to feel His presence. He sensed that something was there but didn’t know if it was God or not. He had no proof; there were no signs. Gradually, the room came back to him, and he was no longer afraid. He could see the white mountain of his father’s pillow and the nightstand beyond it, where the hands of the clock twitched as they moved, and the glass of water his mother had drunk from—three-quarters full. He reached out for it and held it up and the sun filled the glass and then he drank the water and it was warm and tasted like nothing. Maybe he fell asleep, and after a while he heard footsteps and knew it was Wade, because he was slower and stockier than Eddy, and he was glad it was him and then he felt his brother’s thick hand pulling him out of the bed, his heavy arm wrapping around him. Wade got him into the hall an
d down the stairs and out onto the porch, where the sky was a crazy purple and you could see the top of the ridge, the jagged trees. And that’s when he saw her. She was up there on the ridge, waving at them. And he waved back. And the sun was behind her and it was red and bright, so very bright. And he shut his eyes, knowing that when he opened them she’d be gone.
3
THEY SLEPT in their uncle’s attic on narrow army cots lined up like piano keys. Rainer was his mother’s only sibling. His father and his uncle hadn’t spoken in years, nobody remembered why. Cole wondered if Rainer even knew. He ran a halfway house full of used-up crooks and put them to work in his window-washing business. It was what he called a satisfactory arrangement. He was skanky as a ferret with his greasy ponytail and coyote face. People said the war had done something to him. He liked to show off his tattoos. Did this one here with ink and a guitar string, he’d announce with pride, twisting his arm back and forth. Every day he wore the same black leather vest with studs on the back like tooth fillings. Eddy called him a burnout, but Cole knew better. You could tell he’d seen things. Sometimes he’d call out in the middle of the night, like he was scared. He told Cole he’d lost his best buddy on a patrol boat. The guy had been blown to pieces. I held him in my arms till the blood ran out, his uncle said. Now he wore his friend’s earring, a tiny silver star.